The fractal geometry of polymeric materials surfaces: surface area and fractal length scales
Roman, H. Eduardo, Cesura, Federico, Maryam, Rabia, Levchenko, Igor, Alexander, Katia, and Riccardi, Claudia (2024) The fractal geometry of polymeric materials surfaces: surface area and fractal length scales. Soft Matter, 20. pp. 3082-3096.
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Abstract
Using three common polymeric materials (polypropylene (PP), polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) and polycaprolactone (PCL)), a standard oxygen-plasma treatment and atomic force microscopy (AFM), we performed a scaling analysis of the modified surfaces yielding effective Hurst exponents (H ≃ 0.77 ± 0.02 (PP), ≃0.75 ± 0.02 (PTFE), and ≃0.83 ± 0.02 (PCL)), for the one-dimensional profiles, corresponding to the transversal sections of the surface, by averaging over all possible profiles. The surface fractal dimensions are given by ds = 3 − H, corresponding to ds ≃ 2.23, 2.25, and 2.17, respectively. We present a simple method to obtain the surface area from the AFM images stored in a matrix of 512 × 512 pixels. We show that the considerable increase found in the surface areas of the treated samples w.r.t. to the non-treated ones (43% for PP, 85% for PTFE, and 25% for PCL, with errors of about 2.5% on samples of 2 µm × 2 µm) is consistent with the observed increase in the length scales of the fractal regime to determine H, typically by a factor of about 2, extending from a few to hundreds of nanometres. We stipulate that the intrinsic roughness already present in the original non-treated material surfaces may serve as ‘fractal’ seeds undergoing significant height fluctuations during plasma treatment, suggesting a pathway for the future development of advanced material interfaces with large surface areas at the nanoscale.
Item ID: | 82039 |
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Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
ISSN: | 1744-6848 |
Copyright Information: | © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2024. This article is Open Access, CC BY. |
Funders: | Australian Research Council (ARC) |
Projects and Grants: | ARC FT190100819 |
Date Deposited: | 02 Apr 2025 00:35 |
FoR Codes: | 40 ENGINEERING > 4016 Materials engineering > 401609 Polymers and plastics @ 100% |
SEO Codes: | 24 MANUFACTURING > 2499 Other manufacturing > 249999 Other manufacturing not elsewhere classified @ 100% |
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